Something I've seen sporadically over the last few months is a mixture of questions and harumphing at the tendency for people to recommend a very classical looking list of books as ways to get people hooked on Fantasy. You could also substitute very classical with out of touch; short of recently published books, short of diversity among authors. Very heavy on Tolkien to Martin.
Relatively little of what I've seen has been on the Why of this and most of the Why hasn't looked much beyond the idea of older readers reflexively looking back to what introduced them. I know that's about as far as I got last time I looked at it and that's because it's a very obvious, very correct answer. But while it is part of the truth, is it the whole of it? After all, something people make a point of when talking about this is that Fantasy has changed. It is why people feel the need for the list to be up to date. But have we considered all of the ways the genre has changed when talking about why people keep going back in time for their ideas of good Fantasy to introduce people with.
Recently I've been going through a huge reading slump; nothing I've read has captured my attention. There's been a lot of highly touted recent fantasy tried in that period but none of it stuck (although I may yet finish and rave about it). On Sunday though I picked up Daughter of the Empire for a re-read and tore through it. Similarly a re-read of Moving Pictures also went speedily and enjoyably. Are they better books than those I've struggled to get into? No. But they are written rather differently to today's fantasy.
I'll concentrate on Daughter of the Empire. It is a book that gets some cult recognition (not least from myself), mainly for the East Asian inspired world, political focus, and highly intelligent heroine, but that feels mostly forgotten compared to most of the behemoths of 80s/90s Fantasy (despite having Feist's name on the cover). And on re-reading there's definitely some flaws and some things that are very out of fashion. In a way, I feel Daughter of the Empire is stuck between two stools, not executing its focus to the level that modern authors do today (the politics feel great though) and not giving the very traditional male-led North-West European focused fantasy that has such a large fanbase. It is a tad unfair that this is what may have happened, but such is life.
And a certain level of its unfashionableness might lie with its prose too. The PoV meanders, both from character to character and from character to omniscient narrator. The opening chapter consists largely of what could be considered as an info-dump and there's several times the narrative slips into large paragraphs of PoV character just considering certain historical facts or once, their own appearance.
But something else the prose is is that it is very straight forwards and easy to read. It invites swift reading. And this is the part that relates to maybe why people look back to the classics. Eddings, Jordan, Feist, Brooks - all of them have unaffected prose. None of them are particularly involved to read or, maybe Eddings aside, particularly accented. Other authors of their time with ornate and accented prose, like GGK or Vance or Kerr, don't get mentioned nearly as often.
When I compare their prose to those I read during my recent reading slump, most of it was far more like GGK or Kerr or Vance or whoever. There was some very fine prose. But quality of effect and quality of readability aren't always the same thing. And if I start thinking of other authors I've read recently and by and large, they're in this bucket rather than the Eddings/Jordan/Feist/Brooks bucket. Which modern popular authors are in that bucket? Sanderson, certainly. Lawrence and Lynch, maybe. But the likes of Abercrombie and Butcher come with a strong accent. Jemisin and Rothfuss have ornate prose.
Modern Fantasy has very few big name authors with unaffected prose. There's probably a few more I'm failing to name among the big American YA authors but the reason for that is YA Fantasy has become very hived off. People comment on the YA-ish nature of Eddings and Feist and by modern standards indeed they are, but they were always sold in the adult section. Who's got that today? Chakraborty?
I do not think the lightly sketched theory here is the whole of the truth either. It mightn't even be the barest part of it, given how people think and select. That said, I do think there is something to the idea that when we think introductory texts we think light and relatively unchallenging, and that modern Fantasy doesn't exactly provide that in huge amounts. Indeed, arguably, modern Fantasy's point of declared difference from the time of Jordan is that it has sought to make itself far more challenging in terms of, well, everything. Which is not a great trait for introductions. I probably should have said that at the beginning, but it took me a little time to grope towards it.
In any case, I'm intrigued to hear if this rings any bells for anyone else. Let me know what you think.
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